How To Know You Would Make A Good Nurse
Nursing is a great choice when it comes to a good, secure profession that truly makes a difference in the world. However, not everyone is able to be a nurse. Or rather, not everyone has the skills and personality needed to become a great nurse (everyone has the opportunity to be one, but that’s different, of course).
How do you know if you have those skills and personality traits? It can be hard to decide, especially if you already have an idea that nursing would suit you; your ideas and objectivity will be skewed because you want to think that you will be a great nurse. However, nursing is not easy, and there is a lot of study involved, which requires time, effort, and money. Unless you can be fairly sure (and ideally very sure) that nursing is the right thing for you, all that time, effort, and money could be wasted when you actually start the work involved.
This is why it’s wise to work out whether you would be a good nurse ahead of time. Read on to find out what you need to be a good nurse and why it’s so important to get this right.
Caring
It might seem obvious that a nurse needs to be caring, and it might seem true that anyone who decides to become a nurse is generally a caring kind of person, but this may not be the case. There are many reasons why someone might want to become a nurse, and that doesn’t mean they are naturally caring individuals. It might be that job security is what interests them or the fact that there is a lot of career progression. It might be that other family members have been nurses, and they want to follow in their footsteps. Caring might not, therefore, be a major character trait.
However, if you intend to be a good nurse who helps patients and does what is needed (and more), and if you want to enjoy the work you do, then being a caring person is vital. You’ll be able to show your patients that you are taking care of them, you’ll listen to them more, and you’ll know how to help them better if you’re a caring person.
Communication
Are you a good communicator? If you want to be a nurse, it’s important that you are good at communicating or that you can learn to be. Communication is crucially important when you are nursing, as you’ll need to be able to clearly and concisely let others know about a patient’s care. You’ll also need to talk to the patient themselves, and this involves a different kind of communication. Can you switch from one way of speaking to another? Is your ‘bedside manner’ a good one that will leave the patient feeling contented and with all the right information?
Unless you have a good ability to listen and speak and interpret information in the right way, nursing is going to be very hard for you. You’re much more likely to make mistakes or lead to mistakes being made if your communication skills are not up to par.
It is possible to learn how to communicate better, and some of this will be part of your nursing training, although some you’ll need to do yourself. If you already have good skills when it comes to communication, things will be much easier right from the start, and you’ll feel a lot more confident in your work every day.
Problem Solving Skills
If you want to be a nurse, you’ll need to engage in a lot of training. This is true whether you start your nursing degree as soon as you complete high school or whether you choose to go into nursing later in life, perhaps after trying another career and finding it didn’t suit you well, and you use your first degree to study for online accelerated BSN programs. No matter when you start or what level you intend to get to, studying is all part of nursing.
This means that problem-solving skills are going to be useful ones to have, and if you are good at getting past obstacles, then your nursing studies won’t be such an issue – they will still be hard, and there is always a lot to learn, but if you have problem-solving skills, things will be simpler.
What will also be simpler is the work itself. Nurses have to get past challenges every day, and they will often need to come up with innovative ways to do this that help not just them but the patients and their colleagues as well. If you already have this skill, nursing won’t just be a good idea; it will be a great one that you can truly enjoy.
Attention To Detail
When you are a nurse, it’s important to expect to be under a great deal of pressure every day. You’ll have patients to care for, colleagues to help out, emergencies to deal with, and you’ll need to listen to and carry out instructions given by doctors and other medical staff. Altogether, this can add up to be a lot to think about. However, despite all of this, you’ll still need to think about the small things and ensure that, no matter how busy you might be, you pay attention to the details of your work, and not just the larger aspects of it.
This will not necessarily be an easy thing to do. With so many things to do in a shift, it’s much easier to skim over the small details and focus only on the things you are being asked to do. Unfortunately, although this might be easier, it’s not good for the patient – mistakes can happen when nurses work in this way, and that could be very dangerous indeed in some instances. This is why great nurses must be able to be detail-oriented no matter what else is happening around them. If you’re able to do this, you can be sure that – assuming you meet the other criteria – you would be a good nurse.